Vintage Prada, Courrèges, Lanvin, and more: An inside look at ‘The Penguin’s’ costumes

What does a woman in crime wear to work? Just look to Max’s new limited series The Penguin for the answer. On the show—a spin-off of 2022 film The Batman—Cristin Milioti gives a dazzling and disturbing performance as brutal mobster Sofia Falcone, locked in a power struggle against the titular villain, Colin Farrell’s grotesque (and heavily made-up) Oz Cobb, for control of Gotham City’s criminal underground. If you enjoyed Robert Pattinson as the Caped Crusader, you’ll love The Penguin. It’s gritty, it’s emotional, and surprisingly, there’s a ton of great fashion.

To wardrobe the show, costume designer Helen Huang went on a veritable deep dive, turning up with armfuls of vintage Courrèges, Prada, Lanvin, Dries Van Noten, Vivienne Westwood, among other labels. We caught up with Huang to learn more about what it was like to step into this cinematic universe—and how she articulated Sofia’s character arc through clothing.

Harper's Bazaar: On a surface level, one of the more unique things about this production is that it is a television offshoot of an extremely successful film. What was it like for you to step into the universe of The Batman?

Helen Huang: Well, I’ve been a big Batman fan since the Tim Burton films (1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns), and I especially loved the new movie that Matt (Reeves) directed. It had such an emotional, intimate quality to it. I was very excited to enter into this world that he had created. We inherited a lot of lighting and tone and mood, and Matt made a lot of these great references, like The French Connection and Scarface. For me, it’s a world that’s very grounded yet stylised and cinematic. Again, it has this emotional quality to it. Lauren’s script that I read had a lot of narrative that I was really interested in—this idea of institutions failing communities, and the people who use crime as a form of upward mobility. There were some things about the narrative that I thought were so intelligent. It’s just kind of wonderful to see those things talked about in the Batman universe—things that relate to how society operates.

HB: So how did you approach costuming The Penguin?

HH: When we started, I thought of this show as almost a period film. I wanted the viewer to not be able to pinpoint what era it’s in, even though it’s contemporary. What I noticed with Oz’s character from the film is that they paid so much attention to every little silhouette detail of him, and that was something we tried to carry on (for the show). He wears a lot of suits, so we thought about how his lapels look, the material of his outerwear, that sort of thing. We did a lot of research into street photographers like Jamel Shabazz, Richard Sandler, Frank Horvat—people who captured New York City at a very particular time in a vulnerable state.

HB: Do you costume a television series differently from how you costume a film?

HH: No. I think nowadays, with “prestige TV,” it’s all the same considerations. Something like The Penguin is also very ambitious, and every element is similar (to) or the same as film—from the photography, to the costume design, to the makeup and everything. I would even say that doing a series like this is harder, because time is definitely not on our side. And instead of a two-hour movie, you’re making eight hours of content. Audiences have gotten so smart with what television should look like that there is no lower standard for TV versus a movie.

HB: Tell me about Cristin Milioti’s character, Sofia Falcone, and how you dressed her. She seems inspired by classical “mob wife fashion,” but it feels different.

HH: Sofia’s narrative was very important, because she was a female in organised crime, like you mentioned. There was this dynamic when I was dressing Oz and the rest of the Falcones, with “perceived masculinity.” From the get-go, I did want her to feel feminine, but I didn’t want to do the traditional, loud sort of clothing. We looked at a lot of 1960s silhouettes—things that are a little girly still. We looked at a lot of Courrèges, a lot of Edie Sedgwick. There was a series of photographs from Harper’s Bazaar in 1994, actually, of Kate Moss by Peter Lindbergh, that had this ’60s-through-the-’90s aesthetic. As we progress through the series, Sofia’s clothing changes. Towards the middle of the series, it gets more textural, and the colour palette starts to waver and change as she goes through different emotional flows and apexes. At first she dresses the way men around her expect her to dress, and then she evolves and harnesses her femininity in a way and comes into the power of it.

HB: Did you source a lot of Sofia’s wardrobe from vintage?

HH: Most of her wardrobe, maybe 70 per cent, is vintage. We worked with What Goes Around Comes Around, James Veloria, Eye Candy, Quality Mending Co., Stock Vintage, Metropolis Vintage, the Chain, Ending Soon, Angelo Vintage Cult, Farfetch vintage on their website, Amarcord, Malin Landaeus, Lara Koleji, and Morphew.

We sourced a lot of vintage Prada, vintage Lanvin, vintage Celine, and we combined that with a lot of things that were made based on more traditional period clothing. The first white suit was based on Courrèges. The red suit in the later episodes was paired with a vintage Celine jacket, but the pants we made off an image from the 1970s.

HB: So she begins in Prada, Lanvin, Celine—brands which by and large tend to have an aesthetic skewing a little more strict or perhaps minimal. A little more bourgeois.

HH: Towards the end of the series, we sourced more Vivienne Westwood, Dries Van Noten, and tailor-made a lot things to heighten the dramatic moments.

HB: Vivienne and Dries—brands that tend to skew a little more textured, and perhaps play more overtly with colour and print and texture.

HH: With Sofia’s character, she’s been brought up all her life to be the face of legitimacy of her family and to be the good girl. As she progresses, I think she comes to the realisation that she doesn’t need to follow those rules and that she herself has a lot of power.

HB: That sounds like quite the character arc.

HH: We really did try! We did so many fittings. I think Sofia had the most fittings out of everybody.

HB: So you sourced a lot of vintage.

HH: Not to sound like an ad, but the RealReal was an excellent resource. I like to source more vintage than necessary, because it creates something more special with the costumes. With the department stores, with the trend cycles and what’s available, it can be difficult. But when you source vintage, it always lends itself to feeling more lived-in.

HB: But the challenge with vintage is sourcing the correct number of multiples, right? For when you need second, third, fourth identical backups, especially for something with stunts or bloodwork.

HH: We did a lot of building things on top. If Sofia needed to wear a dress that was vintage, we created a coat to go over the top. For a scene that’s really quiet, we can take the opportunity to put her in the one-off pieces. But for something with a stunt, we can work with the director and the actor to, for instance, put a coat that we’ve built over the vintage piece, so the camera only sees it from certain angles in certain moments. It was pretty awesome—costumes can really affect how viewers view a series.

HB: Are there any funny or memorable anecdotes you can share from costuming The Penguin?

HH: There is one from the beginning, as we started our process. It was during the table read. The actors were still doing their fittings, and we got this note that Colin wanted a balaclava, which is a very odd request for a table read—but it was because he was so committed to his character. He put the balaclava over his head so people wouldn’t see him, but hear him in his Oz voice. It really showed his commitment level for doing this whole series in prosthetics.

All images: Max 

Also read: What does luxury fashion mean to the new generation of Indian creatives?

Also read: 50 must-watch films & books if you want to break into the fashion industry